Tifa's weapon shop comment

[Jaitsu]

you know that comment she makes before starting the second reactor blowing up mission, about a weapon shop owner upstairs wanting to give cloud something. i have never been able to figure out what she means, as far as i can see, there IS no upstairs to the 7th heaven

[Aali]

I always assumed she meant the first beginners hall. Would suck to miss out on your first all materia.

[Jaitsu]

I always assumed she meant the first beginners hall. Would suck to miss out on your first all materia.

thats true, though the weapon shop guy is on the first floor of that building.. hmm, maybe just a translation error

[ultima espio]

I've always wondered that too

[nfitc1]

I always assumed she meant the first beginners hall. Would suck to miss out on your first all materia.

thats true, though the weapon shop guy is on the first floor of that building.. hmm, maybe just a translation error

Anyone have the Japanese text of that line? She might be saying "the guy upstairs FROM the weapon's store" or some other odd grammatical construction.

I do remember sharing your confusion as well. After getting the All materia in the beginner's hall I just assumed that the beginner's hall was PART OF the weapon store. Her line still doesn't make sense in context.

{TIFA}
“{CLOUD}! I got a message
   from the Weapon Shop man upstairs.”
{NEW PAGE}
“He has something he wants to give you.
   Don't forget!”

(Wow! There's a lot of unused text in that scene)

That makes it sound like there's a weapon shop above 7th Heaven. There's not one that we can get to at any rate.

[DLPB_]

I would put money on it referring to the beginner's hall.

[sl1982]

Well isnt the beginners hall above the weapon shop? Must be poor wording.

[DLPB_]

yup

[Mirenheart]

Strangely enough, I never got confused by that, even when I was a little kid playing the game. I always knew she was talking about the Beginner's hall.

[DLPB_]

It's not surprising when you consider just how many mistakes there are in that translation....

[Vehek]

Anyone have the Japanese text of that line? She might be saying "the guy upstairs FROM the weapon's store" or some other odd grammatical construction.

<Tifa>
「<Cloud>！
　武器屋２階のおじさんから伝言よ」

As I think I say in many places, I don't really know Japanese. Anyway, that "２階" means "second floor" (in the sense of counting the ground floor as floor 1). A lot of online examples use "２階" as "upstairs", but that's a bad assumption to make without context.

[Jaitsu]

you know what really gets me is how lazy the translators were, you can't sit there and tell me that they saw these weird lines in the game and even think "hey, maybe they meant to say something else"... that reminds me, anyone remember Barrets line on the train about "#*$( pizza"

[GlitterBerri]

<Tifa>
「<Cloud>！
　武器屋２階のおじさんから伝言よ」

Tifa:
Cloud!
A message from the man on the weapons shops' second floor.

I wouldn't say that most translators get to play the game they're working on, Jaitsu, unless they're in-house. A lot of times translators just get the material sent to them without a lot of context and limited contact with/questions they're able to ask the developers. They might have gotten to play it sometimes if they were based at Square-Enix, but certainly not enough to see everything they worked on in-game.

[sl1982]

you know what really gets me is how lazy the translators were, you can't sit there and tell me that they saw these weird lines in the game and even think "hey, maybe they meant to say something else"... that reminds me, anyone remember Barrets line on the train about "#*$( pizza"

I think the pizza reference was based on the fact that midgars upper levels looked like a large circle, ie pizza. Different plates were shaped in what could be called a pizza slice.

[DLPB_]

you know what really gets me is how lazy the translators were, you can't sit there and tell me that they saw these weird lines in the game and even think "hey, maybe they meant to say something else"... that reminds me, anyone remember Barrets line on the train about "#*$( pizza"

He refers to it as a Rotten Pizza.  The #$%  crap was added.

[Bosola]

<Tifa>
「<Cloud>！
　武器屋２階のおじさんから伝言よ」

Tifa:
Cloud!
A message from the weapons shop man upstairs.

I wouldn't say that most translators get to play the game they're working on, Jaitsu, unless they're in-house. A lot of times translators just get the material sent to them without a lot of context and limited contact with/questions they're able to ask the developers. They might have gotten to play it sometimes if they were based at Square-Enix, but certainly not enough to see everything they worked on in-game.

This. Translators, from what I've heard, just don't get much access to the games themselves.

Incidentally, from what I've heard, there are many cases in software development when technical communicators full stop - manual and blurb writers, interface translators and marketing folk - get extremely limited access to the application they're writing for. Even an in-house tech writer has to fight for access to a development environment.

Hell, it can be hard enough getting a new *engineer* access to all the developer documentation.

[GlitterBerri]

Sorry, I made a mistake. I edited my translation in the previous post to reflect that. That explains the location, at least.

[DLPB_]

A message from the man on the weapons shops' second floor.
--------

yes I was about to bring that up actually , I took it to one of my translators who said much same thing.  anyway, did you hear about what Slapshot is ?

[GlitterBerri]

The same materia as 4x-Cut, translated differently when it appears at another location in the script. Right? Shademp told me. ^^ Thanks for that bit of info.

[DLPB_]

   np.  Any more stuff like that, ask me, I love learning this kind of stuff too!

[Tenko Kuugen]

I worked as TL before, even though it was only about 20,000 lines I translated and did it for free. Essentially, most translators virtually have no access to the game whatsoever, making it extremely difficult to cope with certain lines if they use some context like the location you're at. Without knowing that this specific line was in Tifa's bar and that there is no second floor of that bar, it's very easy to make an error there.  That sort of thing happens a lot nowadays, but there's almost always someone poor guy in charge of checking those things now and fixing them if they dont make any sense. That wasn't the case back in 199x

[Jaitsu]

hmm, just makes me think, if the translators were given a chance to play and see where the lines they're translating takes place, they might be able to better translate, but hey, i'm not square, so i probably don't know what i'm talking bout.

[Kudistos Megistos]

hmm, just makes me think, if the translators were given a chance to play and see where the lines they're translating takes place, they might be able to better translate, but hey, i'm not square, so i probably don't know what i'm talking bout.

Square were extremely disorganised back then. I also get the impression that they're the kind of company that's so paranoid that they'd forbid access to the game to as many people as possible

There are also a much more general problem for this kind of thing: the game might not have been finished by the time they started the translation work. Granted, this shouldn't apply in the case of FF7 because the English version came out so much later than the Japanese one, but it's something to bear in mind.

[Timu Sumisu]

look at 14... dont seem to organized now

[Kudistos Megistos]

look at 14... dont seem to organized now

I dunno, I think they have a great plan: make the game more attractive by giving it away for free.

Of course, it still doesn't work. I think they'll have to resort to paying people to play it.